Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
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While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
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In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
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Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.